Derek
Technically, it's poor at best: poor or no editing, very weak formatting (gobs of whitespace, and an inexplicable section that's right-justified). And I detest those “license agreements” that say “This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.” I know US law gives the rights-holder permission to do that, but doing so doesn't make it right. And in this case, it doesn't even make any sense! Surely Columbus wants the promo distributed as widely as possible.
The situations aren't believable, and far too much is left unanswered for this to be called a stand-alone novelette.
They're in the Badlands (bad enough to be capitalized) and we know that there are no laws and extremely dangerous Raiders (also bad enough to be capitalized), and Alwan leaves his son as bait (why else would you leave him sitting beside a nice fire when you go hunting?).And that wasn't the first time. When they're stopped at the roadblock, Alwan tells Moses to "hide" in the back of the van, and stay low. Why should he stay low? Oh, because he's bait, and they plan to be shooting in his direction.At least seven Special Forces ops are sent to bring Moses back (for no reason we can imagine, except that he has an awesome baseball swing), and when they run into Alwan and Moses, they all concentrate on Alwan, letting a young boy run away from them.And finally the Rebel general stabs a prisoner to death. Why? In fact, why would they ever need to even formally execute anybody from the other side? They "loyalists" have all been told that removing their chips will kill them. So, pull their chips! A few die-hards would insist it was trickery, but the vast majority of prisoners would defect almost immediately.
Just not at all believable.
Many years ago, when the world and [a:Philip José Farmer 10089 Philip José Farmer https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1234714074p2/10089.jpg] were (relatively) young, I fell in love with [b:The World of Tiers 3280592 The World of Tiers Philip José Farmer https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1252161628s/3280592.jpg 12790048]. Between this universe and that of [b:Riverworld 370897 The Gods of Riverworld (Riverworld, #5) Philip José Farmer https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388810069s/370897.jpg 360866] Farmer is unsurpassed in the art of world-building.Long after the original five novels of [b:The World of Tiers 3280592 The World of Tiers Philip José Farmer https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1252161628s/3280592.jpg 12790048], Farmer released [b:Red Orc's Rage 591773 Red Orc's Rage (World of Tiers #6) Philip José Farmer https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1323053392s/591773.jpg 2137715], which was still entertaining but short on world-building.I had somehow missed this last novel in the series. And I wish that was still true. Besides a complete lack of anything new, it reads very much like a video I watched the same day: Die Hard with Pugs: a three minute video summary of the movie Die Hard performed with Pugs (yes, the cute little dogs). A great deal of action with absolutely no character development, and our hero continually put into fatal situations and still getting out safely.Almost his only saving grace, Farmer's female characters are generally pretty tough cookies, and don't need a man to save them — though the protagonists are, as far as I can recall, still always men.If you're tempted to read this book, watch Die Hard with Pugs instead. It's funnier and you'll waste far less time.
This showed up on sale one day and, while I have been promising myself I won't buy more books until I get through all the unread ones, the blurb sounded pretty interesting and it did win a Locus award. So, I bought it, and I'm guardedly thankful that I did. I mean, it was a pretty good book, but now I probably have to put a whole lot more [a:Linda Nagata 578581 Linda Nagata https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1545180307p2/578581.jpg] on my to-read list... Nagata presents us with a dystopian society in which nano-technology allows humanity to redesign itself—naturally within parameters set by the current ruling class. Anything that doesn't tamper with your basic humanity is permitted—so you can change your skin color, make yourself immune to disease, probably give yourself amazing strength or speed. But you can't have four legs or—as our protagonist Nikko (rhymes with ‘psycho') does—have a ceramic carapace and be capable of living in a vacuum. The “Commonwealth” has no problem with “humans” with essentially unlimited lifespans, but permits Nikko's existence only as an experiment with a 30 year expiry date. And the thirty years are up. When Nikko steals the Bohr Maker—a piece of nanotechnology that can solve the immediate problem of his impending death—and the Commonwealth police begin hunting him, his brother Sandro, and Phousita (the woman currently hosting the Bohr Maker) we're confronted with a slew of moral problems. Is it wrong to modify the human form? If so, how much modification does it take to become wrong? Is it morally acceptable to give some people immortality (or something close—I think the evil chief of the Commonwealth Police is the oldest person we meet and she's only 134, iirc), while allowing others to live in slums, starve to death, and be subject to any number of plagues? Does the end justify the means (to Kirsten, the police chief: yes, always!)? The “science” in this story is just hand-waving, there's no attempt to rationalize it, but that's okay. The real story is about the moral issues, and whether you can ever put the genie back in the bottle.
I could really be a fan of [author:Barbara Hambly], if only she would write more in her own worlds instead of writing for the Star Wars franchise.
Still, this rather loses its way. Having started with a war between humanity and some subterranean alien presence in [book:The Time of the Dark], and ended the war in [book: The Armies of Daylight ], Hambly seems to have rather lost her way — or perhaps to just be writing in the vein of her Star Wars contributions. All her fans no doubt did want to know more about Icefalcon, but this didn't really draw me in.
It's a joy to encounter an indie author who can write. Well.
This story started out by digging itself a deep hole. The opening scene has a “hunter” (and I use the term very loosely) trying to bag a white tiger — in a “canned hunt”. The tiger is in an enclosed pen, and the “hunter” is in a completely secure, concrete & iron, bunker. I realize Phoenix Sullivan has no intention of being sympathetic to that hunter, or the very idea of equating that behaviour to hunting, but it immediately turned me off, and she had to write very well to keep me reading. Well done!
There were a couple of bits that didn't ring true: when the Evil CEO (my emphasis—in fact, Sullivan treats him much more ambiguously) says of possible lawsuits “if their relatives were to try, well, our indemnity clauses got special attention from our lawyers when they were drawn up in the client waivers. And .... in our employee contracts.” OK, so maybe he really is trying to hoodwink his fellow members of the board, but it would be an odd board of directors that didn't have anybody who knew a little about law: and when you have people sign contracts without being given any idea of the risks involved, any lawyer could tell you it'll never hold up in a court.
But Sullivan easily made up for that in other ways. When the aforementioned white tiger escapes and starts killing livestock (and the ranchers think it's a cougar), it turns out that in North Dakota they're in one of the few states that actually permits hunting of cougars. There I was thinking: “c'mon, where can you go out and shoot cougars?” Apparently, North Dakota...
Perhaps it's just me and the author, but I love her sense of humour: “Silvia loved meetings... especially the little finger sandwiches” (though I have to pedantify and point out that “finger sandwiches” aren't triangular).
Sullivan sounds like she was drawing from experience when she describes the way ranchers, rather than trying to evade public health edicts, slaughter their herds at the possible risk of starving their own families rather than risking the health of other people's families.
Having kept me reading through that first chapter, [book:Sector C] presented an entirely believable plot, both as SF and Thriller, from start to finish. It's not all easy to read, especially for an animal lover, but I can imagine something very close to this happening in the very near future.
ETA: Less than a month after reading the book, this headline crossed my desktop: Scientists have discovered a new type of virus in 30,000-year-old permafrost and managed to revive it, producing an infection. Yikes! If Sullivan's premise hadn't seemed possible before, I'd be reevaluating it now! Sure, she used prions rather than viruses, but ...
I first read this about the time it was first published and, while I've read everything he's written since, I haven't read this for at least 15 years. It's still holding up really well.
As a computer geek, I love Gibson's cyberspace matrix. I WANT that interface to the ‘net. As a reader of thrillers and SF, I love the story.
Case is me! He's a hacker for the love of the job, not the pay (though the pay can be great!). He has an addictive personality. He never really understands why other people follow his lead, or why Molly loves him (even if it's just for a short time).
So Case is blackmailed into a job that he'd have done anyway, and it leads to a surreal caper to free an Artificial Intelligence from the restrictions placed upon it by human law. On a deeper level we're asked to think about what it actually means to be a “person”, and whether preventing an AI from achieving its potential is any better than slavery.
After 30 years—still 5 stars!
I've been meaning to get around to re-reading some of my Jack Vance ever since I heard he died last fall.
This is fairly standard fair for the 60's—an interesting story, but with an Earthman stranded on an alien planet who is, of course, a match for anything that planet can throw at him. All the women he meets need to be rescued (not that he has a good record at that...) and all the aliens are evil.
Still the world-building is better than most of his contemporaries' and other than their oppression of humanity, the aliens are pretty interesting.
Liz Bourke, in her “Sleeps with Monsters” column at tor.com sums this up better than I can, but somehow comes up with a totally different conclusion. Liz says “You may have noticed I'm a little enthusiastic...” and “On A Red Station, Drifting leaves the reader with a pleasant, thoughtful aftertaste.”
I enjoyed the setting and most of the minor characters, but Linh and Quyen, the two central characters just completely rubbed me the wrong way. Neither one of them is willing to bend in any degree, and consequently they just seemed like a pair of alpha-males in drag.
I've been letting Liz choose a lot of my SF & Fantasy reading over the last year, in an attempt to read more female authors, but I think she's only batting about .500.
I loved this 450 page book. Unfortunately, it was almost 700... Up until the point where our central characters actually started to develop “The Plan”—a hoax connecting every occult legend they can find—I was enjoying it, but then Eco got bogged down in the intricate details of The Plan, and I drifted. I loved Belbo's use of his computer—Abulafia, an early PC (repeatedly called a “Word Processor”, but I never saw a word processor that was anything more than a paperless typewriter)—to not only store documents, but to randomly connect axioms to produce The Plan. It reminded me of [a:Arthur C. Clarke's 7779 Arthur C. Clarke http://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1357191481p2/7779.jpg] [b:Nine Billion Names of God 149075 The Nine Billion Names of God Arthur C. Clarke http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1224576760s/149075.jpg 3086150]. Of course, anything mystical that involves computers reminds me of [b:Nine Billion Names of God 149075 The Nine Billion Names of God Arthur C. Clarke http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1224576760s/149075.jpg 3086150]! Ultimately, the whole story is subverted by the mental condition of the narrator (Casaubon). It's impossible to tell how much, if any, of the events that occur are true. Was he insane to begin with, or is he driven crazy by events? He certainly doesn't seem sane at the end, but if he really did experience everything he recounts, who could blame him?
I'm not sure whether I like [a:Michael Connolly 2993228 Kevin Michael Connolly https://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-e89fc14c32a41c0eb4298dfafe929b65.png]'s “[b:Lincoln Lawyer 79885 The Lincoln Lawyer (Mickey Haller, #1) Michael Connelly https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1370140049s/79885.jpg 1427801]”, Mickey Haller, or Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch better. I think it probably depends which one I've read most recently!Whatever the case, I love Mickey Haller. Mickey is conflicted. He knows that the job he does as a criminal defense lawyer is important, and he knows that he's very, very, good at it. But he also knows that sometimes he helps guilty men walk. And that makes him feel guilty too. While that guilt makes him human, and occasionally drives him to drink, he's not the kind of self-indulgent sot that I so hate in mysteries.I won't spoil the revelation to explain who the Gods of Guilt of the title are, but of course it also refers to all the people who Mickey feels are judging him for the choices he's made through his career (not all of whom are even alive).There's no “whodunnit” here. We know almost immediately that Mickey's client is innocent, and it doesn't take much longer to be pretty sure who is guilty. What is here in this story is a solid courtroom procedural, with plenty of soul-searching about how one does the right thing, and even what that right thing is.
[book:Snow Crash] is a hilariously inventive melange of three different concepts.
On the one level, we have Stephenson's portrayal of the United States of some not-too-distant future in which the federal and state governments are either non-existent or marginal and corporations are the new powers. This results in a very fragmented society, where the majority of the middle-class live in “burbclaves” and pizza is delivered by the Mafia. Corner stores are operated by Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong®, private jails are operated by The Hoosegow™ and The Clink®, and all police are private. While it's definitely over-the-top, it's not completely far-fetched—there are plenty of indications that America, if not the world, is heading the way of total corporitization (is that a word?) Maybe the Mafia™ don't really want a corner on the pizza market, but the rival organized crime groups in my city do operate pizza stores; America is racist, and seemingly becoming more so, not less.
On the second level, it has some problems. The Snow Crash of the title is both a linguistic and a computer virus. The whole “language as virus” concept, and the idea of computer languages having the same effect on the brains of programmers as the spoken language of ones birth would have on anybody, is pretty hard to swallow. Much of the premise is based on the fact (I don't even know if it really is fact) that ancient Sumerian is not related to any existing languages. Of agglutinative languages (of which Sumerian is an example), Hiro says: “You are saying, ... that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.” Well, no. That's not what an agglutinative language is (at least, no more so than English is a long stream of short syllables...).
Conversely, Stephenson's concept of the Metaverse — basically an Internet that is entirely modelled as a 3D virtual reality — is bang on. THIS is the concrete implementation of Gibson's abstract cyberspace.
I'd wonder if this is a “guy” book, since none of my female GR friends seem to like it, and my male GR friends seem to love it, except that my wife things it's pretty phenomenal too...
The publisher calls Harry Turtledove, “the master of the counterfactual”. I always thought he specialized in alternative history, but I like that label.
For all that [book:The Diary of Anne Frank] left indelible marks on so many of us, can anybody say the world would not have been a better place if she'd survived the war?
Gladwell's usual thought-provoking social science.
I was particularly struck by the chapter about the woman who chose to go to an Ivy League university instead of the local state university, and found herself so far out of her depth that she switched out of the science program. She'd always wanted to be a scientist, and feels that if she'd just gone to the local university she'd have been one. I knew from an early age that I wanted to study computer science—so I applied and was accepted at the best school in Canada (and easily one of the best anywhere). Unfortunately at Waterloo, Computer Science is a specialty of Math, and I never could get the hang of integrals—I'd have done much better if I'd gone to my second choice.
I found the chapter about Northern Ireland far too simplistic. Gladwell portrays the Catholic population of Northern Ireland as the David being suppressed by the Protestant Goliath, with the aid of the British army, and to an extent that's true. But he casually ignores the fact that Northern Ireland shares a border with the Republic of Eire, a very porous border, and that the IRA—while officially banned in Eire—was using the support of a large part of the population of the southern republic to carry out their own reign of terror. There were no good guys in The Troubles.
Quite amazing.
In my defense, I've just lost my 14-year old dog, and was drinking to forget, so it came as a surprise to me when I figured out, only about half-way through, who the Black Amazon was... but I hadn't realized when I downloaded this from Project Gutenberg that it was an Eric John Stark story, so I was focusing on that. Clearly, however, the Amazon wasn't wearing the armor shown on the cover of the “Planet Stories” magazine issue that the story appeared in, or Eric John Stark wouldn't have been so slow on the uptake either.
Leigh Brackett may well have been the last practitioner of the Edgar Rice Burroughs school of Mars stories. Like ERB's Mars, this story is completely unscientific. Generally, I prefer Brackett's Skaith novels, because they're set on a complete fantasy world that can be anything she wants, rather than a Mars that is nothing like what we know it is, but really, it doesn't matter what the setting is, because the stories are about Stark and his need to make things right in the face of oppression.
Stark is from a long literary line of humans-raised-by-animals (or at least savages) like Burroughs' Tarzan or Kipling's Mowgli, and like them he has learned to be the best of both worlds.
In this outing, Stark must return a stolen talisman (read: powerful artifact of long-forgotten science) that protects all of Mars from the return of an ancient race of pure Evil from beyond the Gates of the Dead. My only problem with the story is that, in its time, the solution probably seemed fine, but in 2014 I can't help thinking that “pure Evil” really means “unfathomably alien” (since no evidence of actual Evil is presented) and that there should have been a better solution to the co-existence of the two races.
Nicola Griffith says of Hild “The first half of her life can be summed up in one short paragraph,” which is convenient for a novelist. As Colleen McCullough said of her Rome novels, it was so much easier to write about Rome before Julius Caesar: because his life is so well documented that it's very difficult to fit a fictional novel in the spaces.
So, Griffith has built a complex and believable tale of the life of the girl/woman who would become Saint Hilda of Whitby. Hilda holds a special place with the people of my mother's hometown. Saint Hilda's (Hartlepool) was my mother's parish church, and Hilda was abbess there (not that it was called Hartlepool at the time) before she became the abbess in Whitby, so I was anxious to read this and I know I've got my mother interested, too.
Young Hild (at nine, and even younger) is treated as a seer by her uncle the king. Though the people believe she's a witch (hægtes), there's nothing supernatural in her ability—her mother has trained her from birth to be extraordinarily observant¸and Hild realizes at one point “The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe.” That is, if you present most people with something they know is true, but don't think you could know, they'll think you're a prophet. The only thing a little hard to believe in this is that Hild started so young, but is it really more difficult to swallow than Mozart composing at four?
Hild's father should have been king, but was poisoned—probably by now-king Edwin, his brother—so Hild as the King's closest relative who is not one of his children has to walk a fine line. She observes, collates, and then puts everything into the language of prophecy for the benefit of the king, knowing that one false prediction will mean her death. At the same time, the kingdom is slowly becoming Christian, and the powerful priests fear and despise her: “Paulinus told me Christians don't believe in prophecy.”“Not in prophecy by women.” She can't refuse to prophesy for the king, but if she does the priests see it as the work of the devil: unless of course her prophecies match the priests' vision, and she has to thread her way between the two demands.
Along the way, the reader will learn far more about England (and a little about Scotland) at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions than was likely presented to them in school. Griffith may not have got everything right, but I doubt she got much provably wrong, and she's certainly done a good job of bringing young Hild to life.
Not as good as Fitzgerald's first outing, but still enjoyable.
I had some difficulty with credibility, but the reader has to remember we're talking about Italy. Or at least the Italy of crime fiction. The corrupt Carabiniere seems over-the-top, and certainly would be if set in North America, but is probably not worse than I have seen in other crime fiction set in Italy. I don't know enough, personally, about Italy to know how corrupt the police are, but one suspects that the novels might not be telling the whole story.
On the positive side, the police work is solid, and clues don't have to appear by wild coincidence to advance the plot.
I read this as a group read with the Miévillans group. This was the first novel of Vallente's that I've read, but not the first of her work, and everything I've read of hers has been fascinating.
This is a fascinating meld of a retelling of old Russian fairytale and new(ish) Soviet reality. I can't say I was very interested in delving into the Soviet background of the story, and rather hoped that it was going to be far more fantasy than history. One reader said "Soviet reality was a far cry from the magical world Valente paints", but I don't see that—there's a Soviet reality (part of that reality, I expect, is one reason the twelve fathers don't seem as communal as the twelve mothers—there almost certainly aren't twelve of them in the house), and a separate magical world. Our heroine, Marya, is at their intersection, but Koschei the Deathless, god of Life, takes her away from the Soviet reality and shows her a different one: the reality of the "strong and cruel". I recently read [b:Tam Lin|51106|Tam Lin|Pamela Dean|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388351951i/51106._SY75_.jpg|49879], and the editor of the Modern Classic Fairy Tales series had bemoaned the fact that modern fairy tales have been largely bowdlerized... then promptly presented the most innocuous retelling of [b:Tam Lin|51106|Tam Lin|Pamela Dean|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388351951i/51106._SY75_.jpg|49879] imaginable. This, OTOH, is a Fairy Tale, in capitals.
I love how Valente overturns our notions about Life and Death. We always think of Life as good and Death as bad, but until the harsh Soviet reality reimposed itself, Death seemed to describe a pretty jolly hedonism, while the Tsar of Life is a very frightening force. Valente says "The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous."
Koschei teaches Marya to be strong, but he also teaches her to be cruel: and perhaps to nobody more than to himself. Marya indulges in a certain amount of "casual careless cruelty", but the greatest cruelties are directed against her lovers, Koschei the god, and Ivan the human, yet somehow it seems impossible that she could do otherwise. She finds herself pushed into situations where she can't find a humane way out (except to give up her own life: which, as I believe, should not be required of anybody). Marya determined long before meeting Koschei that she would take some power in any future relationship, and then Comrade Zvonok, the house-elf/domovoi who is tied to Marya's house, told her that marriage is all about "who is to rule." So, of course she schemes to ensure that she will rule (not terribly successfully...)
Another reader asked: "Why is it that these stories can exist in their own countries so long but they disappear - or at least severely diminish - when people leave for new shores?"
Much as I disliked [b:American Gods|30165203|American Gods (American Gods, #1)|Neil Gaiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1462924585i/30165203._SY75_.jpg|1970226], that—and numerous other books that plowed the same field—explain it pretty well, and I think it's very much as with Comrade Zvonok. We brought our 'gods' across the ocean, but the fae folk are very much tied to place. [For the mythological and etymological record, I note that "domovoi" is the same word as "dobbie" (yes, the house elf in Harry Potter)].
Baba Yaga sets Marya three challenges before she can marry Koschei. I have to take some issue with Baba Yaga's threat "Better married than rendered into girl-broth and maiden cutlets." It's hard to find maiden cutlets after you've "let the groom have his way with your womb for a year..."
The first two challenges are typical of pretty much any decent fairy tale. I have some qualms about the first—terrifying an innocent old lady—but I figure Naganya would probably be doing something similar if she wasn't helping Marya, anyway.
The third was mildly pornographic, and the first real example of the “casual cruelty” we discussed in the group read. When Marya realizes that Yaga has tricked her and she is being expected to retrieve Koschei's 'death', she doesn't hesitate. She spends no time at all thinking whether there's a way to save her own life without betraying Koschei: she just does it.
Yes, she knows that stealing Koschei's death won't kill him, but she also knows that it will be a betrayal, because this is what all his previous lovers did. She has to be feeling, at this point, that Baba Yaga has simply short-circuited the whole courtship-marriage-betrayal-death-rebirth loop.
Then suddenly, Marya deserts Koschei the Deathless, and returns to Leningrad with Ivan — just in time to endure the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad by the German army in WWII. Plunged back into 'reality' at its worst, it only enhances and expands the whole fairy-tale nature of the story.
I read this for the Chaos Reading: Treasure Hunt challenge and nothing less could induce me to read another book like this.
I'm fairly sure I read every single word, but my eyes glazed like a fire-brick, so perhaps I missed some.
It's drier than a brick after 10 days in the kiln.
But I now know more than anybody needs to know about the brick industry in Nova Scotia.
